1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to systems and methods for navigating through and searching for sites on a distributed network.
2. Description of Related Art
Increasingly, the World Wide Web has become the information repository of choice for both corporations and individual users. The ubiquity of World Wide Web browsers and the push by many corporations to adapt commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology have all helped the World Wide Web become the delivery option for most information systems.
To this effect, web site designers and information architects have endeavored to identify the types of users traversing their document collections or web sites. This information is then used to tailor the delivery of information based on the user's needs and the tasks the user performs. A user's access patterns of a document collection and/or one or more web sites may be determined using conventional access information and/or special instrumentation added to client access software.
For example, the Toolbar™ 5.0 system from Alexa Internet™ provides a customized toolbar that is added to the client browser. Using the Toolbar™ 5.0 product, a user of this system is able to compile information regarding a site visitor's path and make suggestions of a next connection based on the similarity of the current path to accumulated historical browsing information. Similarly, the SurfAid™ product from IBM® uses on-line analytical processing methods to provide a user of this product with counts of users following traversal paths. This system then attempts to assign each user path to a user path category.